There is an increasing demand for packetized data services over wireless communication systems. As traditional wireless communication systems are designed for voice communications, the extension to support data services introduces many challenges. The conservation of bandwidth is the overwhelming concern for most designers. In uni-direction transmissions, such as broadcast transmissions, a single broadcast content is provided to multiple users. The users are identified by a unique identifier which is then included in addressing information. In such a system, multiple infrastructure elements may be required to duplicate the broadcast packets so as to identify each of the multiple intended receivers. The duplication of transmission signals uses up valuable bandwidth thus reducing the efficiency of the communication system, and increases the processing requirements of intermediate infrastructure elements. For a broadcast service in particular, the number of target recipients may be prohibitively large, thus creating problems of resource allocation and loss of available bandwidth.
There is a need, therefore, for an efficient and accurate method of transmitting data to multiple recipients in a wireless communication system. Further, there is a need for a method of routing broadcast data to multiple users, wherein each user is uniquely identified as a target recipient.